Scientists make huge discovery on swarms of ‘microbots’

Researchers at Purdue University have designed a new technique to control swarms of individual, ultra-tiny robots by powering and controlling them with magnetic forcefields

According to Discovery, each of Purdue’s microbots is around the size of a dustmite. The research team, headed by mechanical engineering professor David Cappelleri, has said that the new technique will allow the microbots to complete complex tasks that require them to cooperate.

What distinguishes the new technique from previous ways of controlling microbots is the way in which the bots can be controlled individually. Techniques that have come before have been able to exact a certain amount of control over groups of microbots, but only over the group as a unit and not in terms of individual bots.

“The reason we want independent movement of each robot is so they can do cooperative manipulation tasks,” says Cappelleri in a university press release.

“Think of ants,” he says. “They can independently move, yet all work together to perform tasks such as lifting and moving things. We want to be able to control them individually so we can have some robots here doing one thing, and some robots there doing something else at the same time.”

To allow for this type of independent movement, the team at Purdue developed a system of magnetic fields generated by an array of tiny planar coils in the robots’ “workspace.” The magnetic fields that are produces are localized, meaning that they can control and guide the robots individually — as opposed to global field that would move the microbots as a group.

The same magnetic fields that control the robots power them as well. Because they are too small to be powered by batteries, they needed to come up with an alternative power solution. They found they answer in the magnetic fields.

The research posits that microbot technology has practical application in manufacturing and medicine. For example, the bots might be used in biopsies or for detecting cancer.